"Did Fay tell you that about the Prayer Book?" I asked, with a stab of anguish. It was incomprehensible to me how my darling could have discussed, even with her brother, things which lay entirely between her and me. I could never have talked to Annabel about matters which concerned Fay and myself alone! I should have regarded them as too sacred. But that is where men and women are so different from each other, and where women are so much less reserved than men. I believe that good wives tell more about their husbands than bad husbands ever tell about their wives. But good Heavens, how it hurt! "Yes," replied Frank, quite unconscious of my pain, "she told me everything. And it was only after she had told me everything, and I saw how miserable you were making her by setting Miss Kingsnorth above and before her that I began to urge her to run away and begin life over again. Of course I see now it was wicked of me to do so, although I was so furious with you for thinking more of your sister than of your wife; and besides being wicked, it was useless. Fay loved you so much that being away from you didn't seem to mend matters at all, but only to make them worse. But I thought that when once she'd got away from you and your treatment of her, she'd begin to forget you, and be happy again as she was before she and you had ever met. But unfortunately I was wrong." I groaned. I couldn't help it. "Then another time," Frank went on, the Wildacres never having been denied freedom of utterance, "she was almost mad with joy because you came all the way from Restham to Liverpool Street to meet her on her way home from Bythesea. It looked as if you really were as much in love with her as she was with you. And then you went and spoilt it all by saying that you had come to please your sister. Now, I ask you, what wife could stand that? I'm sure you wouldn't have liked to feel that Fay married you in order to please me: and in the same way she didn't like to feel that you had married her to please Mrs. Blathwayte." "But it was absurd of her to feel like that! She must have known that I worshipped the very ground she walked on, and that the only fly in my ointment was that I felt I was too old and dull to make her happy."